Selected Correspondence Vineeto Jiddu Krishnamurti RESPONDENT: My previous teachings to me are about the actual. For example, a key ingredient of my previous teachings is about having a direct experience of the actual which I feel is necessary to having a PCE. VINEETO: I am stunned that you can call Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching being ‘about the actual’. If you had followed a bit of Richard’s extensive correspondence with many, many people on this very same teacher’s mailing list, you would at least have noted that Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s concern is the transcendental and nothing but the transcendental. Vis:
In order to be able to say that Mr. Krishnamurti’s teachings to you are ‘about the actual’ you have to either ignore 90% of Krishnamurti’s teachings or twist the meaning of the word ‘actual’ into meaning spiritual and transcendental. ‘The key ingredient of [your] previous teachings is about having a direct experience’ of the divine, not the actual. Vis:
I have no problem with whatever name you might give to your goal and your experiences but denial and transcendence are sure methods of avoiding a Pure Consciousness Experience. For comparison I copied a description of a direct experiencing of the actual.
And just a little bit further in the correspondence files I found a perfect example to demonstrate actuality:
RESPONDENT: My previous teachings to me are about the actual. For example, a key ingredient of my previous teachings is about having a direct experience of the actual which I feel is necessary to having a PCE. VINEETO: If Krishnamurti’s method and other methods of ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-knowledge’ were able to produce a PCE, it would have happened by now, don’t you think? I acknowledge that to grasp even a glimpse of the actual world is very difficult because normal reality is all we know and spiritual reality is all we imagine. For that very reason it is so vital to remember or to experience a pure consciousness experience. However, changing a few words, applying your previous spiritual methods and denying even being spiritual at all is a sure recipe of cutting yourself off from ever experiencing anything outside of the Human Condition. RESPONDENT: Direct experience of the actual would be being with this monitor without having other thoughts about the past, etc. I’m not into any new age teachings. I clearly see the difference between sensual feelings and affective feelings. VINEETO: As you might have gleaned from Richard’s description, your ‘direct experience of the actual’ and Richard’s direct experience of the actual are two different pairs of shoes. The choice is always yours. * VINEETO: In order to be able to say that Mr. Krishnamurti’s teachings to you are ‘about the actual’ you have to either ignore 90% of Krishnamurti’s teachings or twist the meaning of the word ‘actual’ into meaning spiritual and transcendental. ‘The key ingredient of [your] previous teachings is about having a direct experience’ of the divine, not the actual. Vis:
RESPONDENT: I was talking about the teachings themselves such as being aware of what I am actually doing, thinking and feeling from moment to moment and you have added a quote from his early years and what he may or may not have meant by truth at that period of his life. VINEETO: I find it interesting that you should object to the relevance of the above quote from J. Krishnamurti by saying that it was ‘from his early years’. This is one of the several stock standard responses that were used by several faithful followers of Krishnamurti when Richard introduced quotes on Mailing List B to prove a point he was making. Only in September last year Richard had a lengthy discussion with one correspondent about that very same argument ... ‘from his early years’ . You were also writing on the list at the same time but maybe you missed the exchange. I have copied the relevant correspondence at the end of this letter. I had posted this particular quote because I know from my thorough investigation into my years of spiritual dependency that you cannot separate the teachings from the teacher and just pick out a some advice that seem worth applying in your life and ignore the rest. The above quote shows clearly, as do many others from his later years, that J. Krishnamurti was a through and through spiritual person – ‘God-intoxicated’ – and his declared purpose was to teach people how to achieve this experience for themselves. Vis.:
Therefore, following his method can, at the most, lead you to what he achieved – becoming yet another spiritual teacher immersed in ‘that which is eternal’ – and not knowing anything about a ‘direct experience with the actual’. RESPONDENT: I have been spiritual in my life but I am not spiritual now. Truth to me is what I am actually doing, thinking and feeling from moment to moment. I’m sorry if I have wasted your time. I will continue to look and see if I have any spirituality. VINEETO: Personally, I was never attracted to J. Krishnamurti or his teachings as I considered them too dry and theoretical at the time of my spiritual involvement. Instead, I got sucked into the emotional indulgence and the escalating esoteric extravagance of Mr. Mohan Rajneesh. Yet the relationship that I had to him as my master differs not from the relationship that other followers have to their particular master – is it invariably epitomized by unquestioning adoration, deep felt loyalty, a love that excuses and defends the master’s every word or deed and the pride of being a disciple of such rare outstanding and powerful personality. Krishnamurti’s claim that he did not want to be a master nor want his followers to be devotees only created an apparent intellectual coolness but it never altered the fervent emotional ties that each of his followers had, and still has, with him. If you take the time and read through some of Richard’s correspondence with mailing list B you will quickly understand what I mean. Before I could learn, explore or even consider that there was any new approach to life I had to question this highly emotional relationship to the one teacher that I had considered to be the only authority and fountain of wisdom. My worldview was coloured and measured against the authority of his words and teachings. If others stated similar views and ‘wisdoms’, I considered them right, if not, they were wrong. My judgements had nothing to do with my personal investigation of facts at all; it was solely a ‘feeling right’ decision according to my preconceived convictions solely derived from the master’s viewpoint – and the fact that he had been dead for 10 years did not change my emotional dependency on his authority at all. An honest and in-depth investigation of the facts of the situation was only possible after I ‘tore Rajneesh out of my heart’, became a traitor to his message and his ‘sangha’ and thus became independent of his imagined approval or condemnation. Only then was I able to listen to his discourses and judge with my newly freed intelligence instead of ‘my heart’ and to discover his mindless twaddle and ‘compassionate lies’, his manipulation and deceit, his outright distortions and underlying ancient rotten Indian belief-system. Now I could start the long and fascinating journey of unravelling the intricate web of the psychic world – the Eastern spiritual fears of endless karma, the hope for transcendence, the reverence for intuition, love, compassion, bliss and enlightenment. Once one starts to see the psychic world and how it functions, the word ‘spiritual’ is revealed in its fuller and more comprehensive meaning. You felt moved to defend your teacher the moment I quoted him in order to prove that he is concerned only with the spiritual and the divine and not with the actual. This reaction indicates where to look when you want to ‘see if [you] have any spirituality’. So in order to ‘continue to look and see if [you] have any spirituality’, you will first and foremost have to consider and investigate your affective relationship to your ‘previous’ teacher and teachings. Otherwise any factual discussion about what Krishnamurti said or meant will be distorted by the emotions that are instigating automatic instinctual (or, as LeDoux calls them, ‘quick and dirty’) reactions rather than considered intelligent responses. RESPONDENT:
This is what K means by the actual to me. I don’t see anything divine about this. It is what I am actually thinking, feeling and doing from moment to moment. This is ‘what is’. It is not what I want it to be or what it should be but what I am actually thinking, feeling and doing from moment to moment. What do you say? VINEETO: The actual that is evidenced by a pure consciousness experience is what is left when the ‘believer’, the ‘feeler’ and the ‘thinker’ – all of the ‘self’ – is in abeyance, when all ‘my’ input has ceased. Then a tree is simply a tree, a coffee cup is a coffee cup and street noise is simply street noise without any emotional or spiritual relevance to the eyes seeing and the ears hearing. There is no malice and sorrow, no love and condemnation, no affective or philosophical meaning in anything actual. This is the actual world, which only becomes apparent in its utter magic and ever-fresh exuberance when the ‘self’ is either temporarily absent or permanently extinct. Krishnamurti’s ‘actual’ is a different experience – it is polluted by love. His imperative is ‘you must love’ in order to ‘understand what is’. This ‘observing thought’, according to Krishnamurti’s imperative, is actually an observation of feelings and he is making a preconditioned judgement of what is to be considered good and what is to be considered bad, as in ‘you must love and not condemn him’. According to Krishnamurti one must love ‘what one thinks, feels and does from moment to moment’. Thus the lover as an identity does not disappear but is only strengthened by this highly conditional method of observation. Therefore the understanding and experience of ‘what is’ is not the pure ‘self’-less actuality of this moment – it is the traditional love-enhanced viewpoint, the divine Reality of ‘What Is’, overlaying and corrupting the experience of the purity and perfection of the physical universe. If you want to conduct a sincere and fruitful investigation into your instinctual passions you will have to abandon any preconditioned and preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad. To discover the actual world beyond my beliefs, feeling and instinctual passions I don’t merely observe what I think, feel and do from moment to moment, but I actively and unconditionally investigate into the cause, the core, the root, the why and how and when of ‘who’ I think, feel and instinctually know ‘I’ am. When I arrive at the root of an emotion or emotion-backed thought and see the passionate investment of my identity wanting to stay in existence through feeling and emotion, I can then deliberately abandon my investment and step out of this particular aspect of ‘me’. Once you do this with diligence, honesty and persistence for a year or so, there is not much left of ‘you’, neither the loving ‘you’ nor the condemning ‘you’. Already this much is a truly remarkable freedom. VINEETO: My so-called assumption today is that you have yet to understand the difference between spiritualism and actualism and between the spiritual world and the actual world. Without understanding and acknowledging the difference between the two, you cannot genuinely begin to practice actualism. Actualism by its very nature has nothing at all to do with spiritual practices aimed at discovering the ‘fountain of Truth’. RESPONDENT: Your assumption is based on your interpretation of what was said in the past. Here and now I thoroughly understand the difference between the spiritual and the actual and I am definitely not spiritual. You sound no different than a street corner preacher to me. You keep trying to shove your religion down my throat even though I have clearly stated that I don’t want it. I don’t have to use the actualism method to investigate myself. VINEETO: Whatever method you have used so far to investigate has not helped you to recognize what is meant by the word non-spiritual, otherwise you would recognize the silliness of your religious concepts about actualism. In Actual Freedom you won’t find God or Love or a Higher Self or life after death or any kind of spiritual non-physical energy or any Supreme Intelligence. This absence is not a clever linguistic ploy but a direct result of the fact that in the actual world there is no God nor Love nor a Higher Self nor life after death nor any kind of spiritual non-physical energy nor any Supreme Intelligence. That you ignore all this factual evidence and still keep persisting in you own religious concepts of actualism may well be because you want your teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti to appear non-spiritual despite the fact that his teachings are littered with spiritual-religious words. Here are only two examples of J. Krishnamurti’s spiritual teachings –
I make this assumption on the basis of experience with many people who I have talked about abandoning the spiritual path and so many of them have immediately said they are non-spiritual as well and then talked about Rajneesh, Krishnamurti, Buddhism, and the like as saying exactly what I am saying. I can only assume that too many years on the spiritual path means that words get to have no meaning whatsoever. Spiritual methods are based on the idea that one only needs to change one’s concept of oneself and then Everything, or better, God, the Truth, the Good and the Beauty will be revealed. The Advaita method of ‘You are already That’ and you only need to remember this often enough makes the spiritual concept of no change most obvious. When one applies the actualism method one does not merely change one’s concepts but investigates every inkling of spiritual-religious belief, concept, idea and all its related feelings. In actualism one dedicates oneself to bring about actual and irrevocable change in one’s software programming, both the social-spiritual conditioning and the instinctual survival program. Only continuous practical commitment and stubborn effort will bring about an actual change and free one’s senses from the social shackles we grow up with and the instinctual passions we are born with, and that is one of the main reasons why actualism is so unpopular. However, the rewards are beyond my wildest dreams. VINEETO: As the actual world is already always here one is bound to stumble upon it by diligently removing the obstacles in front of one’s ‘psychic eyes’ that we have inherited by default – through no fault of ours. GARY: Yes... ‘stumble upon it’, an apt description of serendipity. Had I not participated on [Mailing List B], I would not have been acquainted with Richard’s experiences, nor those of any of the others of you. At the time, I was wallowing around in the morass of choiceless awareness and was frequently confused and in turmoil. It seemed to be a bottomless pit, and as with Krishnamurti, there is no ‘way’, no method, I was loath to find a way out. But I was looking for a way out in spite of ‘the teachings’. VINEETO: Yes, serendipity is taking the opportunity that comes along – you have been the only one so far of all the fifty people who Richard corresponded with on that list and maybe 50 more who read what he wrote. We have given away 40 of Peter’s journals and sold 25 of Richard’s journal, written on several mailing lists and I am always stunned by the disinterest and the amount of petty or virulent objections to becoming happy and harmless. It obviously takes the right ingredients to be daring and willing to take up the challenge – watching your exploration into actualism I understand more and more what kind of ingredients one needs. And yes, Eastern spirituality is a bottomless pit and Krishnamurti’s teaching has the particular twist that you should listen but not interpret, listen but not follow, aspire but never reach. What an insidious legacy, keeping everyone small and ignorant – and this is called Compassion! But then, no belief has common sense in it; otherwise it would not require belief. VINEETO: You had a lengthy conversation with Richard on this topic. Continual repetition of your belief in an ‘unknown way (mode existence)’ of actual physical objects will not turn this belief into a fact. RESPONDENT: We will never know what is out there, lets call it underlying reality. VINEETO: The identity parasitically inhabiting the flesh and blood body superimposes an affective ‘underlying reality’ over the actual universe. This ‘underlying reality’ created by the identity inhabiting the flesh and blood can be observed, questioned and investigated and the identity thus weakened – this is the process of actualism. To defend the ‘underlying reality’ as unchangeable is to resign to being trapped within the human condition of malice and sorrow for the rest of one’s life. RESPONDENT: Is like the TV unless we have the receiver nothing can take place. The TV signals that exist now in my room are silent and colourless. Lets say the TV receiver is the brain. VINEETO: This is a good example.
The high-frequency radio waves acting as carriers for the transmitted images and sounds exist independently of the TV screen that displays image and sound. Both the transmitter and the high-frequency waves exist as an actuality and the signals and images are being simultaneously converted into identical images on many, many TVs regardless of whether your own TV is switched on and is converting the signal into an image. This fact is contrary to your philosophy of ‘unless we have the receiver nothing can take place’ – a completely ‘self’ centred viewpoint. ‘Lets say the TV receiver is the brain’ – even without your brain ‘creating’, the universe is continuously taking place. RESPONDENT: So I arrived in the logical (at least for me) that the perception is a syntheton (composed) phenomenon. The perceiver and the perceived are one thing. VINEETO: You have mentioned in an earlier post that you have read J. Krishnamurti for 10 years. I wonder what logic came first – J. Krishnamurti’s teaching that ‘the perceiver and the perceived are one thing’ or the logical-for-you conclusion ‘that perception is a syntheton (composed) phenomenon’. RESPONDENT: That what I was trying to say to Richard not where is due the green colour in the chlorophyll etc. So the universe without our brains has really no meaning. There is no interaction in it. VINEETO: Yes, I can see that this is a logical conclusion due to J. Krishnamurti’s teachings. However, it is a subjective, anthropocentric and utterly ‘self’-centred perception of the universe. To make oneself so important that ‘the universe without our brains has really no meaning’ is to dismiss the splendour and magnificence that is already always here, was already always here before homo sapiens first trod the planet and will be so long after homo sapiens cease to exist as a species. RESPONDENT: Forget about consciousness there is no need for consciousness in what I am saying. VINEETO: Given that consciousness is the state of the body being conscious, you need to be conscious in order to have this conversation. Rather than ‘forget about consciousness’, it has been vital for me as an actualist to investigate consciousness as it is used in philosophical and spiritual circles –
What I discovered is that it is people’s precious consciousness, as in the ‘totality of the thoughts, feelings, impressions, etc., of a person or group’ which prevents human beings from living in peace and harmony. RESPONDENT: P.S In your other email you named Osho. I consider him the biggest fraud of the past century with his Mercedes, VINEETO: By the way, Mohan Rajneesh didn’t drive Mercedes, but Rolls Royces. I mentioned Mohan Rajneesh because Dr. Amrit Sorli, the man you quoted in order to demonstrate the non-infinity of the universe, is apparently a follower of Mr. Rajneesh – he lives in a Rajneesh centre and certainly sprouts ‘Sannyas wisdom’ in his various articles. If you consider Mr. Rajneesh ‘the biggest fraud of the past century’ I am left wondering why you posted an article by one of his disciples as evidence to prove your point? RESPONDENT: … and any other guru the same. VINEETO: Does ‘any other guru’ also include J. Krishnamurti? I am only asking because you stated that ‘the perceiver and the perceived are one thing’ – a basic teaching of J. Krishnamurti. It is undeniable that J. Krishnamurti was a guru – he talked for 52 years in order to convey his teachings and some 15 years after his death some of his followers are still trying to listen, understand or even live his teachings. When I began to dismantle my spiritual beliefs I began to understand that it is the revered state of Enlightenment itself that is fundamentally flawed and that it needs to be debunked for the massive delusion it is. RESPONDENT: May I comment about the paragraph below of your last email? to No 16, 24.9.2003 The state of permanency (wanting to have always peace, joy, bliss) is what all of us actually want, isn’t it? We want a state in which there will be no disturbance of any kind and which will never come to an end, a permanent state which we call peace; and the mind is making a constant effort to capture that state, to enter into it. So we have to understand the process that is involved in this effort. Surely, the mind is seeking a permanent happiness, permanent stillness, a reality which is secure, unchanging; and as long as the mind is seeking a permanent state, it must create paths to that state. But can we get it? Is there a state which knows no change at all? Actuality is ‘what is’ and what is is not a permanent state, it is a constant movement because we are never the same from moment to moment, and to find out what is true, it is essential to see what we are from moment to moment. Life is action; each moment of this action has never been before, and will never be again. If we thought of ourselves as in a state of continual movement, then there would be no conflict between the changing circumstances of life and the thing we now think of as being permanent. The constant desire for greater and greater sensation must inevitably lead to pain and sorrow, as this desire makes us prisoners at the very beginning. I can also see very clearly that there can be a state of mind in which there is no change at all, but it can only come about when the mind is motionless and stable. Such a motionless state is a still mind, not a dead mind, and it knows neither impermanency nor permanency. It is a mind that is completely quiet. Such a mind does not demand change, and all its action springs from that silence. That is the only state in which the conflict of the worrying mind completely ceases. So, is it possible to move from here to there, but not in time? When you understand the whole process of change, and thereby let it drop away from you, you will see that the mind is in a state of silence in which all movement of time has ceased, and that new movement of silence is not recognizable and therefore not experienceable. Such a state does not demand change; it is in eternal movement, and therefore beyond time. Let us attack it from another point of view. Are you ever conscious of being silent? Have you experienced silence? If you have experienced silence, then it is not silence, is it? If there is an observer observing silence, then it is the projection of the experiencer – the experiencer wishing to be in a state of silence. Therefore it is not silence. Reality can never be experienced; if you do experience reality, then it is not reality because then there is the division between the experiencer and the experience. That division signifies duality and all the conflicts of duality. So silence can never be experienced. A mind which is silent is not conscious that it is silent. So also with humility. If you are conscious that you are humble, then that is not humility. If I am conscious that I know, then I am ignorant. If I am conscious that my mind is silent, then there is no silence. So silence is a state of mind in which there is the absence of the experiencer. Can you listen in that state of silence, being unaware that you are silent? Any experience which has continuity is based on envy, on the demand for the ‘more’; so the mind must die to everything it has learned, acquired, experienced. Then you will find that the mind is silent, and this silence has its own movement, uncontaminated by the past; therefore, it is possible for something totally new to take place. We think truth can be experienced right away through doing certain things. You think there is a state which is permanent, and you want it, so you practice, discipline, do various methods or forms of exercise, but you will not get it. The mind must be free – it must have no borders, no frontier, no limitation, no conditioning. The whole sense of acquisitiveness must come to an end, but not in order to receive. VINEETO: The ‘state of permanency’ you are referring to in your regurgitation of Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings is not at all what I was talking about when I said to No 16 –
The following links on the Actual Freedom Trust website can assist you in finding out in what way any and all spiritual teachings lie 180 degree opposite to an actual freedom from the human condition which can be temporarily experienced in a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience.
If I were interested in teachings of Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s, I would not rely on rewrites from his followers but I would read what the man himself said. However, in my 15+ years of 24/7 involvement in Eastern mysticism I have gathered enough experience and evidence to be certain that none of the highly revered teachings from the various masters does deliver the goods. What’s more, peace on earth is not even on their agenda. Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti himself has made it clear to all who take his words to be the Truth that following his ‘Teachings’ will not result in any of his followers manifesting the ‘supreme intelligence’ he claimed to have had –
If you had not been so keen to peddle your borrowed wisdom on this list, you might have taken notice that the very first line on the Actual Freedom Homepage reads –
I admit one needs a certain amount of naiveté to take those first six words of the website at face value, given that there are a glut of snake oil sellers out and about advertising their otherworldly rehash of ancient superstition as being not only new but also non-spiritual. However, if you have come across this Actual Freedom mailing list because you are in some way disenchanted with Eastern mysticism then I suggest you study the contents of the website rather than waste your time preaching to those who have moved on. * RESPONDENT: So finally you’ve decided to show up! VINEETO: It has obviously escaped your attention but I showed up a good while ago. I have been here on this mailing list since its inception – t’is you who are the most recent ‘new-gurus-buster’ in what is now a long line of a passing parade. RESPONDENT: Thank you for welcoming me to this email-listing. I was curious to find out what you guys of the AF are ‘actually’ saying – presently, now, in this moment, quasi live. Your website is too old; it’s the past. So don’t direct me to it anymore, please. Be patient and kind and let us read your ‘actual’, ‘innate’ wisdom of this moment. VINEETO: What I wrote 3 years ago is as valid today as what I write today. When I discovered actualism in 1998 it took me about a year of diligently applying the method of actualism to rid myself of the bulk of my social identity and then begin to explore the depth of my instinctual passions. Over a period of 5 years I have repeatedly reported my experience as to how actualism delivers the goods to make me happy and harmless. From numerous ‘self’-less, i.e. ego-less and being-less, pure consciousness experiences I have first hand knowledge that the splendour and effervescence of the actual world that far supersedes any affective or spiritual experience of freedom. To dismiss what has been written before as being ‘too old’ is to be disinterested about what another human being has to report about their discovery of how to bring about peace on earth. Your dismissal of ‘too old, it’s the past’ particularly falls flat as you seem to have no problem holding valid what Jiddu Krishnamurti has said more than half a century ago. Vis:
I have moved on from the ancient wisdom, esoteric and superstition that is spirituality – the challenge for you now is, are you at all interested in something that is fresh and new? * VINEETO: If you had not been so keen to peddle your borrowed wisdom on this list, you might have taken notice that the very first line on the Actual Freedom Homepage reads –
RESPONDENT: [The tone of your words are personal] and harsh! VINEETO: I read through my previous post to you very carefully and I did not find any harsh words – unless you felt it to be harsh that I am not interested in regurgitations of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings. * VINEETO: I admit one needs a certain amount of naiveté to take those first six words of the website at face value, given that there are a glut of snake oil sellers out and about advertising their otherworldly rehash of ancient superstition as being not only new but also non-spiritual. However, if you have come across this Actual Freedom mailing list because you are in some way disenchanted with Eastern mysticism then I suggest you study the contents of the website rather than waste your time preaching to those who have moved on. RESPONDENT: No doubt you guys are very ‘learned’ of JK writings (the new search engines help a lot on that). You all like to make propaganda of him, although in a negative way. Don’t bring dead people to the arena, it will be more valuable to you if you can see the ‘regurgitation’ of your own conditioning. Throw it out, get rid of it, so you can be decisively, permanently free and happy. Until then, to where are you seeing ‘those [your followers?] moving on’, where are they going? You are giving your ‘disciples’ the illusion of spiritual progress. You are ‘those’, don’t escape from yourself with ‘those’. VINEETO: May I ask what is your personal experiential expertise for giving advice to others as how to conduct their lives? What of the wisdom you proffer has practically changed your life for the better in that it made you more happy and more harmonious in relation to your fellow human beings? So far I have only read that you practice being ‘tremendously aware of every movement of thought’ and that you practice ‘me listening to myself; like a mirror’. (To Richard, About Permanency, 29.9.2003). And your admonition to not bring dead people to the arena is odd given that it is you yourself who have come to this list offering the teachings of a LDM. As for ‘those who moved on’, I was referring to myself and those few intrepid pioneers who have moved on from the ancient spiritual practices and philosophies and are interested in actually changing themselves, not ‘saving’ others. As Actualism is a method to be practiced entirely on one’s own; there are neither gurus nor followers nor disciples, so your jibes completely miss the mark on this list. I suggest reading a post from 7.8.2003 by No 47 on not ‘saving’ others (even though the term calenture is misappropriated here) as it might be useful to be aware of some responses to the other guru-busters and flamers who have come and gone before engaging in further foolishness. As for the ‘illusion of spiritual progress’ – given that actualism is utterly and completely non-spiritual, as I have already explained in my last post to you – there is no such thing as ‘spiritual progress’. The progress lies in becoming more and more happy and harmless, more and more free from malice and sorrow and ever more delighting in being here. This progress is tangible, palpable and existing in fact. RESPONDENT: You and I share the same consciousness field. We are like the rest of the world. VINEETO: No, both of your statements are wrong. You and I don’t ‘share the same consciousness field’. You follow the guidelines of a died-in-the-wool spiritualist who described himself as God-realized while I have long ago rid myself of all spiritual beliefs – you and I are poles apart. RESPONDENT: Don’t be so concerned with ‘pces’, ‘supreme intelligences’ or whatever names are given by those who believe have attained something. You are envious of them and their extraordinary experiences – you want to be as ‘special’ a being as they are. VINEETO: There is a world of difference between a PCE and the ‘supreme intelligence’ of spiritual fame – 180 degrees opposite in fact (see ). Your statement is meaningless which makes your admonitions nonsense. I certainly don’t want to be ‘as they are’ – I have studied the gurus, both male and female, both from afar and up close, and I didn’t like their lifestyle, I didn’t like how they were with their women or men and I didn’t like how they treated their fellow human beings. How can I be envious of them when I have found something far superior to spiritual enlightenment – the method to an actual tangible palpable freedom from the human condition, and the corroboration that the method works in practice – it has thus far produced a virtual freedom from malice and sorrow 99% of the time. Has the thought ever crossed your mind, or should I say have you ever been aware of a movement of thought, that you might be wasting your time ‘busting’ what doesn’t exist here at all? KONRAD: Let me point at an anecdote. Some people had heard from Krishnamurti. They heard that he was called by others the ‘world teacher’. So they went to him to put this ‘arrogant bastard’ right. But when they actually met him all of this aggression vanished, because they saw immediately that they were mistaken. VINEETO: Talking about Krishnamurti – he was the one who was treacherous, suspicious, malicious and dishonest in his relationship to his mistress of long years (the wife of his best friend). He even dragged people to court in his old age and inflicted immense suffering on those closest and dearest to him. The daughter of his mistress had lived with him in the first 20 years of her life and has given a very detailed and amazingly objective account of his actions in his private life, that depict a stark contrast to his ‘teachings’ in public. And he was even recognised to be enlightened! It certainly does not save him from being a nuisance! – Not that Rajneesh was any better. He was another nuisance on the grand scale! * KONRAD: Well, let me tell you something else. In my eyes, what you describe, sorry to say, is peanuts when I compare it with what I had to go through when the process started in me. In the early years this ‘process’ was so severe, and was so painful in my head, that it took me no less than 1 1/2 years, in the first year meditating for 8 hours a day, and the 1/2 year after that 5 hours a day, to let my body adapt to the immense pressure that penetrated my skull, and to be able to perform the most basic tasks of daily life. In this period of time I had very frequent and very severe cramp-like attacks, much like epilepsy, with its severity. And even during the 8 years following these years, wherein I continued to meditate for at least 2 hours a day, these attacks persisted. My body had to adapt to an energy that was of such an extremity as only somebody like Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti and the likes can imagine. In fact, Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s passing out at the most odd moments because of the severity of this energy was a very known phenomenon to all of the people close to them. It happens that my constitution is much stronger than that of Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti, and therefore I have never passed out. Still, every time such an attack emerged it was a very intense ‘discharge’, causing me to be totally out of breath. VINEETO: This is what I mean by escapist: sitting in a room with closed eyes for hours on end, retreating just into the head and pretending the rest of the world does not exist! I tell you, compared to your coco-nuts I do prefer my peanuts. At least there is no headache or epilepsy-like symptoms! You compare yourself to J. Krishnamurti, thinking what a great achievement your process is (is this maybe called ego?). If you read Radha Rajagopal-Sloss’ book ‘Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti’ you can see for yourself that this man as a human being in his private life had no quality worth emulating. Your ideas of achievement go along the scales of suffering – Greatest He Who Suffers Most. But this will also be the solution that you are offering to other people: suffering. As if the world is not already full of it! Why add severe headaches to the trouble everyone already has?! So, I do prefer peanuts, thank you. Because ‘following a confused soul’ as you put it, I examined and experimented successfully with Richard’s radical new method and ended up without beliefs, without sorrow and malice, experiencing the world as paradisical as it is, rich with pleasures and delights, enjoying their full impact on all my senses in this very actual physical world. To say: ‘You are still missing the point. Actuality is also just an idea’ is simply not understanding that ‘actual’ is the experience of the world as it is, after ideas have been stripped. Otherwise it would be call ‘idea-l’ not ‘actual’. I had joined your conversation with Richard because I saw you were operating merely in the world of thought-constructs, ignorant or in denial of the body, the senses and the delights of being alive after all hindering emotions and beliefs are eliminated. You were and are still trying to find reasons and excuses not to come in contact with this actual world of the senses and of common sense. I admit that I have failed. It has been great pleasure and learning but I can’t see a point in continuing. I had simply wanted to present to you – as does Richard – another way of living, happy and harmless, relying on and delighting in the senses, on intelligence and common sense. You prefer to compete with J. Krishnamurti in suffering, while trying to tell me off and saying I am just ‘following a confused soul’. Strangely enough, you are having miles of in-depth conversation with Richard, taking him very seriously there. This behaviour is illogical, hypocritical and looks plain silly. I have come to the conclusion that you are not interested in becoming happy and harmless, you prefer your version of achievement and suffering. It is your choice, but know well that you are making a choice. KONRAD: So I do not subscribe to the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’ Richard makes. VINEETO: Of course, you don’t. In order to know ‘the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’ Richard makes’ one needs to have experienced actuality, which only becomes apparent when both ‘‘I’ and ‘Self’’ are absent. KONRAD: Whenever you ‘are seeing something as it actually is’, it is part of ‘your world’, and therefore it is part of your understanding. Now our language system is such, that anything we understand is also something we can express verbally. This verbal expression of ‘a fact we are aware of’ is nothing else than ‘a truth’. So the difference between ‘actual’ and ‘real’ is just a difference of perspective. When we become totally aware, totally conscious of some actual fact, we can express it in language. This expression of language is then a representation of the actual fact. And that is, logically speaking, exactly the same as a truth. To think that they are of an essentially different order, as Richard asserts, is, again, the fallacy of representation, as I have explained above. VINEETO: Now if you go ‘all the way, you then come to the understanding of J. Krishnamurti, namely that that what you see in other bodies as their ‘person’ is what they experience as ‘the world’. You then begin to see, that there is no difference between ‘I’ and ‘world’ other than a difference in perspective. Your definition of ‘something as it actually is’ is J. Krishnamurti’s personal definition of the term ‘actual’. J. Krishnamurti makes it perfectly clear that for him ‘what actually is’ is one’s affective perception of the world, one’s feelings, beliefs and passions. Vis:
J. Krishnamurti, like all spiritual teachers, never questioned his own special affective perception of the world – otherwise he would have been in for a surprise, the surprise that there is a pure and perfect actual world hidden beneath one’s emotional-spiritual perception. Richard’s description of actuality, however, is the description of his ongoing experience of the world as it is, when the flesh-and-blood body is devoid of any ‘self’ or ‘Self’ whatsoever. Actuality is what becomes apparent when ‘my’ perception of ‘the world’ has ceased. (...) * KONRAD: What he failed to see, and what is characteristic of the kind of enlightenment of J. Krishnamurti and me, is that the ‘Self’ is identical with ‘The world’. He interprets it as a form of ‘magnanimous self-glorification’. But that is not what this statement means. When J. Krishnamurti says: ‘you are the world, that is a fact’, he means to say, that ‘that what you consider to be ‘the world’ is in reality nothing else than your person. It is the total of all of your understandings from which your actions arise. What you experience as ‘the world’ is what somebody else would designate as ‘your person’. VINEETO: As for ‘the kind of enlightenment of J. Krishnamurti and me’ – J. Krishnamurti at least was genuinely deluded while it would be more honest for you to admit that you are busily pretending to be something that is yet to happen. KONRAD: Nowhere have I seen anything of Richard showing that he understood this, or even that he understands this now. This is why I say, that he has not really been enlightened in the sense Buddha, or J. Krishnamurti was. In other words, he does not know from his own experience what he is talking about. VINEETO: That you have not ‘seen anything of Richard showing that he understood this’ is due to the fact that you never really read what Richard wrote to you. You said so yourself. Vis:
Richard has had extensive correspondence with you over several years, explaining in meticulous detail the difference between actual freedom and enlightenment. If someone has to show ‘that he understands this now’ then it is you. But given that you consider yourself as enlightened as Jiddu Krishnamurti, i.e. you consider enlightenment the be all and end all of human achievement, it is no wonder that you have difficulty comprehending that there is indeed an actuality beyond your perception of ‘you are the world, that is a fact’. That Richard was not really enlightened is objection number 27 that has been hurled at him many times and he has refuted it just as many times. This objection is the cheap way out for those who refuse to question their own vacuous pursuit of the glamour, glory and glitz of spiritual enlightenment. KONRAD: However, he did take the following step. Seeing ‘emotions’ as the culprit. VINEETO: Which is more than Jiddu Krishnamurti ever understood, not to mention your own confusion of emotions with intelligence. KONRAD: But he did not move further. Instead of seeing how emotions arise from the picture of the world, and seeing its identity with the ‘Self’ as in the statement of J. Krishnamurti: ‘you are the world, that is a fact’, he paused at emotions, and tried to develop a system whereby you can eliminate emotions. VINEETO: ‘The statement of J. Krishnamurti: ‘you are the world, that is a fact’’ is J. Krishnamurti’s limitation to venture beyond his grand personal affective perception of the world – the typical limitation of Eastern mysticism. Given that you have put yourself on the same pedestal as Jiddu Krishnamurti, as in ‘the kind of enlightenment of J. Krishnamurti and me’, you also still have to venture beyond your grand personal affective perception of the world and investigate and experientially understand your own emotions ‘as the culprit’. KONRAD: His system does this in two ways, one legitimate, the other destructive. The legitimate part is trying to become totally aware of your emotions. The illegitimate part is trying to confine the mind to the concrete. VINEETO: It is your conceptual invention that actualism is a system. It is you who keeps trying to make assorted systems out of how Richard experiences the actual world – a flesh-and-blood body without identity. If you want to consider actuality ‘illegitimate’ then that is your limited personal viewpoint. The division of your world into abstract / concrete and legitimate / illegitimate is mere ethical conceptualization and has nothing to do with actuality and facts. Personally, I questioned my own affective perception of the world about abstract and concrete and replaced them with facts and I questioned my moral and ethical values and replaced them with common sense. This way it is very easy – if one is so inclined – to move beyond one’s ‘picture of the world’ and the well-trodden spiritual path of ‘you are the world, that is a fact’. KONRAD: This attempt will fail, because it is a variation of the ‘choosing paradox’. You can choose for A, B, C etc. You can even choose not to choose for any of the alternatives. But that is still a choice. You can choose not to choose, but you cannot not choose. VINEETO: The attempt that you think ‘will fail’ is already history – actual freedom has happened to one man and the method is applied by a handful of people with great success. Your theory about ‘the ‘choosing paradox’’ has been proven wrong. It is another one of your unfounded principles about an actual freedom from the human condition, the understanding of which will elude you as long as you continue to see yourself and the world through the concept of Eastern mysticism and Western science-fiction. * KONRAD: The only person who has made such an analysis of anger of this generality, taking both the advantages and the disadvantages into account, and who has found ‘rock bottom’ is J. Krishnamurti. He stated, that every emotion arises from thought. This is consistent with the finding that people have different emotional reactions to the same events. To be precise, those thoughts you have accepted as ‘true’. Meaning, that they are, when verbalized, accurate descriptions of whole classes of actualities and facts. Anything you accept as an adequate description of actual facts, i.e., truths, becomes, by the very act of accepting a source of emotions. When somebody doubts these truths, they generate anger, or dismissals, as in your case. And as such they cause the ‘human condition’. That is the message of J. Krishnamurti. VINEETO: Far from being the only one who ‘who has found ‘rock bottom’’ J. Krishnamurti was also not the only one whose personal actions in life proved his teachings of peace and bliss wrong. Not only did he betray his best friend Rajagopal by having a long-standing affair with his wife but he also sued the same man over endless lawsuits for documents he did not want to be published. In case you want to verify this information, here is the text of the final settlement of the lawsuits (written in legalese language) –
Therefore, whatever his ‘analysis of anger’ was, he did not apply it to himself and if he did, it did not work. It is also one of the great spiritual tricks to blur the difference between a fact and what one believes to be true. Belief relies on hearsay, trust and hope and is usually passionate defended, ‘a source of emotions’, as you say. A fact is simple ‘what is the case’, it stands for itself. This monitor I am looking at has a screen made of glass – this is a fact, verifiable by the manufacturer or other experts. You may believe otherwise but that does not change the fact. Therefore stating a fact needs neither believing nor trusting nor hoping nor any other ‘source of emotion’ – it is simply factual. KONRAD: A message Richard apparently is not capable of understanding. VINEETO: You have conveniently overlooked that Richard has been enlightened for eleven years. He knew Eastern mysticism by his own experience and studied particularly J. Krishnamurti in detail as you can verify by reading Richard’s correspondence on Mailing List B. As I said before, your objections are becoming rather repetitive. RESPONDENT: I wouldn’t say it is shameful to attach oneself that deeply to another, but it is futile and silly. VINEETO: Says he who has been defending Krishnamurti’s teachings like all get out, only to deny, true to the teachings, that you have ever followed any teachers or teachings at all. You also seem to persistently and stubbornly ignore the fact that I fully acknowledge drawing from Richard’s expertise and that I am applying the method he developed in order to become free of the Human Condition in me. This has zilch to do with worshipping a master with love, dedication and humble gratitude. I don’t expect that you will understand the difference because it is apparent that you have not explored the true nature of power and authority in the spiritual world. (...) * VINEETO: First you must carefully read what is written rather than rewrite what is written so that it suits your own teachings and wisdom. Your carelessness keeps you stuck to the Tried and Failed methods of Krishnamurti’s teachings and prevents you from carefully considering the third alternative that is being offered. I do understand that you might still not quite understand what is being offered for it took me months and months of careful considered word for word reading and a good deal of reflecting, contemplating and nutting out to begin to get a glimpse of the vast poles-apart difference between what is spiritual and what is actual. But the rewards of abandoning the Tried and Failed spiritual path and applying the method has resulted in a freedom, peace and happiness that is already beyond my wildest dreams. The result far surpasses anything offered or achieved in the spiritual world, for this freedom, peace and happiness is actual, palpable, tangible and eminently liveable in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. RESPONDENT: First of all, I regard Krishnamurti’s words as art, as literature: nothing more. As I said above someplace, I wanted to challenge your cock-sureness that your actualistic ideas are some kind of Truth, which all other poor, unfortunate human beings have missed out on. You see, all philosophy is the ‘tried and failed’. VINEETO: Ah, now you finally reveal your motivation for this conversation. You are not writing to another human being in order to compare notes and convey experiences, you merely want to ‘challenge [my] cock-sureness’ in order to cut me down to size, to subdue me into ‘long overdue silence’, to put me in my place and teach me the ethics of spiritual humbleness. I must acknowledge that you are putting a good deal of effort into cutting me down to size. This attitude against anything new that is not ‘corroborated by others’, as you said before, reminds me of Galileo Galilei who stood trial for his empirical confirmation that the earth, in fact, moves around the sun and not, as was generally believed in those days, the sun around the earth.
VINEETO: Galileo was ‘cock-sure’ because he had factual evidence of Copernicus’ mathematical calculations, but it took another 350 years before the leader of the Catholic Church would acknowledge these findings as factual. RESPONDENT: You may now add actualism to the junk pile, as it too is but another philosophy, another method. Krishnamurti did say that he proposed no method, and, having read some of his words, I am inclined to agree, as his is ‘find out’, whereas yours is ‘follow me’, or as it were, ‘actualism’. So Krishnamurti’s often repeated admonition to ‘not follow’ is dutifully followed in that you also don’t follow? However, Krishnamurti consistently referred to all his words as ‘Teachings’ and he proposed a method all right, which was the very point where this conversation started. He said –
However, this proposed method, combined with the admonition not to follow did not produce the desired result – nobody ‘got it’. Vis:
So then, what are the actual benefits of Krishnamurti’s ‘no method’, and his admonishment to ‘find out’ and not follow? One outcome I see is ‘they’ll all pretend or try to imagine they can get in touch with that’ and that everyone will frantically assert that ‘I don’t follow’, thereby loyally following Krishnamurti’s admonitions. His admonitions really put people’s knickers in a twist! Personally, I have chosen to stand on my own feet and have investigated all my beliefs in authority, whether the authority says ‘follow me’ like Mr. Rajneesh or ‘don’t follow me’ like Mr. J. Krishnamurti or ‘you are just a follower’ like No. 8. What I did three years ago was check out the bona fides of a fellow human being and see whether what he was saying was factual and whether the method he was proposing to become free of the Human Condition worked. I am reporting that it does, not that I expect you to believe me in order to investigate for yourself, for your anti-stance blinds you to what I am really saying here. You can rile against me and protest all you want, you are just missing the point of what I am saying.
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